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Actually, why prefer Kubuntu to Mint's KDE version? Kubuntu has made some really strange calls, such as going w/ ReKonq as their default browser. When Canonical dropped support for them, it would have made sense for them to go w/ Mint, but for their developers to refine the various KDE applications out there, such as Calligra Suite, and so on, and leave the OS part of the work to Mint.

This would be a more useful work than just one more Linux distro, which is currently #26 on Distrowatch.

I avoid any distros that use.rpm files as the packaging manager. Apt get and.deb is a lot more reliable, although I'd love to know what the situation is w/ PC-BSD's PBI. But w/ any distro using yumm, I just dread dependency city!

A better question would have been - why prefer Mint's KDE to that of other Ubuntu based distros, such as Comice?

Mint requires a re-installation/import whenever there's a new release. Kubuntu, I installed once somewhere around '07 and the upgrades every 6 months are painless. You can make an argument that Mint's approach is safer, but isn't it good to have distros for both strategies so both strategies can develop further and people who prefer each have a choice?

I think this is wonderful news as KDE has been the saner choice as of late as far as stability, but if they are smart they will base it on Debian and NOT Ubuntu. it is pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that Canonical is floundering, trying to find a business model that will keep them alive and failing, first Netbook edition (coming waaaay past when that boat had sailed) and then trying to rip off of all people that stupid ass MSFT idea of pushing cell phone UIs on the desktop, hoping they can sell either Ubuntu TV (not a chance, Android and embedded Linux variants has that tied up) or Ubuntu smartphones (not a chance the market is too crowded as it is, its obvious it'll be owned by apple and Android) so they can expect quality to go down, bugs to go up, simply because they have ZERO real revenue stream and Shuttleworth has already said he's not sinking more of his money into Canonical.

Debian was here before Canonical and will be here in 3 years when i predict Canonical will either go cloud server OS only or close their doors. they have testing if they want to be cutting edge but IMHO basing it on stable would be the way to go, a rock solid never breaks KDE with a push towards user friendliness might be just the ticket to gain some share when MSFT shits out Win 8, aka "My God I want to be the CEO of Apple so bad it hurts!" Ballmer edition.

Problems? As far as I can tell, Canonical was Kubuntu's primary problem, and finding an independent sponsor is an awesome solution.

I hope this works out. I vastly prefer KDE over that Unity abortion Canonical is trying to foist on us. I'd use Kubuntu over Ubuntu even if Kubuntu stagnated completely, but this makes avoiding Canonical's silly marketing games practical.

I was with Debian since v4 - finally ended with Debian 6.04. I won't go back. Not only is the installer a pain in the rump, but it's almost impossible to install the binary nVIDIA drivers on a 5 year old card even.

I went with OpenSUSE 12.1/KDE 4.6 works like a charm, AND I installed the nVIDIA drivers without a bit of a problem.

If you wish to give up and use something else, be my guest. When you start messing with facts is when I take issue. I am not attempting to make myself appear smart, I am merely providing counter-anecdotal evidence. I didn't reply to you for your benefit, but to make sure that the impressionable bystander is not given a one-sided narrative. Reports of difficulty are greatly exaggerated by you, full stop, no need to worry that there's some fundamental flaw in Debian.

The installer sucks (why it stays frozen, doing exactly nothing for about 30 minutes on all my machines after copying files is a mystery), granted, but I have a working Geforce FX 5200 (from 2003) using the legacy 173 drivers from the repository. No pain at all. (Getting a Radeon HD5570 to work, on the other hand, was a bit more challenging because it requires a manually written xorg.conf.)

About the egos, I always smile when I read on distrowatch's list of cons "discussion in the mailing lists can get a bit

So you are scolding a distribution that sticks to its beliefs in freedom? Debian does not ship with any non-free software by default. That includes wireless network drivers, proprietary video drivers and other.You can get an installer image that includes non-free drivers at this location:http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/

I fully agree w/ this. As for the GP's point - RMS still dings Debian for even offering 'non-Free' software in its repositories, so what they are doing is thankless anyway. Instead, during installation, they could, somewhere at the beginning of the installation, ask an user whether s/he wants to restrict the installation to software whose source codes are freely available, or not, and include suggestions on which ones to pick if they are in doubt. Then do the install from there. If the user chooses the

Checking out Blue Systems' [blue-systems.com], looks like they will be sponsoring KDE Mint, Netrunner and other KDE related projects as well, which is cool. Hope they include PC-BSD as well, so that they cover not just Linux, but BSD as well.

Also, it would be a good idea for Blue Systems to sponsor some strategic KDE apps, such as Calligra, Konqueror and so on, and maybe, at some point, even take over the development of Qt and KDE as well. That way, any unix that offers KDE will have a readymade OOB experience regardless

Unlike Unity and Metro, the KDE project accepts that different platforms have different requirements, and has a different UI for each so that they can be best tuned to the platform, w/o being constrained by design decisions of another. KDE has one UI for desktops/laptops, one for netbooks and one called Plasma Active for tablets. As a result, their desktop version has a taskbar similar to Windows 7 and prior, while Plasma Active is purely a touchscreen oriented interface.

It sounds like a big improvement to me. I can't help thinking that the Gnome faction was pushing hard for "integration" with the lastest Gnome whizzy idea of the week, to the detriment of KDE stability.

Is that another way of saying that with Canonical's push to new UI front ends and Stores and stuff, that support for the KDE side languished?

My theory is, the only purpose of kubuntu as a Canonical project was to apply their "branding". But all I want, as a longtime KDE user, is for Kubuntu to be as much like upstream KDE as possible. Oh, and exercise better judgement about when to push shiny new upstream releases. 7.2 was a disaster, it completely broke Kmail. There is no way that should have gone into general distribution until upstream got their act together. If Kubuntu had done the right thing and held it, the worst damage would have been fi

Gnome classic with GTK3 is missing a lot of functionality and is nothing like Gnome 2.3x in flexibility. Cinnamon looks promising as a Gnome 3 shell replacment but right now it's still a work in progress.

Both MATE (fork of GNOME 2 retaining everything you know and love from 2.x) and Cinnamon (Linux Mint's fork of GNOME 3 aiming to bring a more traditional interface with the same powerful backend) work perfectly on Ubuntu 11.10 and I'm assuming also 12.04. I ditched 11.10 for Debian when it first released as I detest Unity with a fiery passion and don't think much more of the atrocity that the GNOME developers have unleashed either. However, Debian (testing) soon switched to GNOME 3 as well and I was back

Personally, I think it makes sens for distributions to begin going their own way. I don't think it's a bad idea of Ubuntu wants to say, "We're developing a Unity-based desktop OS. If you want to install KDE, be our guests. If you want to create a whole KDE-based fork, we have no objections. However, we're just going to focus on making a consistent and coherent desktop environment using Unity."

Different distributions can make different choices. Fedora might make a Gnome distribution and SUSE might make

About the only things I want from a distribution are a good package manager, a good selection of available packages, and timely attention paid to security.

What comes installed by default is something I'm likely to rearrange anyway. I don't like Unity either, which is why it would be installed for all of a few minutes until I replace it with something else if I decided that Ubuntu/Kubuntu fit my criteria.

So how many Slashdotters really just stick with defaults no matter how much they like something else better? Seems like a total non-issue (and a non-complaint) to me.

If it's going to uninstalled in a few minutes, why install it in the first place? It seems like it would be easier to just do a minimal install. I don't know of any distros that don't allow a minimal install. Either that or find a spin with the software that you actually want.

I don't know for other slashdotters, but I can tell you why I care about sane defaults. Support. You see, many slasdotters live in a void where there is their desktop and the rest can just suck it up. I, on the other hand, help other people with their computers.

Ubuntu, until the version 10.04 LTS, was a distribution you could take, drop on a machine, install half a dozen packages (Thunderbird, Restricted Extras,....) and be done with it. Installation time very quick. This compared to a Windows install which can take a up to a day, including hunting for drivers, software, securing it and finally setting the GUI to sane defaults. It's a complete pain.

Now, assume just for the sake of it that I ddi default installs for my friends and family and let them figure it out, and I do my thing in my corner. First support call, I get from them will put me and Linux in a bad light (either, or... ) and I want neither. Thus, I use the default desktop in order to be able to support them! Eating your own dog food, you know.

Deviating significantly from default install, increases the initial install time and increases the risk that you forgot to change a tiny GUI setting you use. (Example from the Windows world: you work with extensions turned on, the default is off. You forgot that on you family/friends computer. Try explaining the how to turn it on and why you need it, as it now suddenly deviates from what they are used.

That's my personal problem with the whole debacle. Furthermore, there has to be said something about software quality feels. If you have sane GUI settings from the beginning, your software is perceived as higher quality. That is also very important for the normal user. That we, nerds, can change everything to our hearts desire is not important to them.

As for Unity, I hated it at first too, but the changes in 12.04 beta, improved its usability. It's not perfect, but by now I can see my mom use it. (She's on 10.04LTS) and that/is/ important to me.

I'm not at my computer right now, but I'll check for you when I can. It's something I never noticed, so it probably doesn't irk me. I can understand that such small things annoy. Many of those and the frustration adds up.

I just checked. No, it still hides the menu and you need to hover over it to get the options. Weird, I never noticed this before or at least it didn't annoy me. I bet that now I know, it will start to annoy me. *sigh*

So how many Slashdotters really just stick with defaults no matter how much they like something else better? Seems like a total non-issue (and a non-complaint) to me.

The problem is that in most distros the default system is installed around the default desktop UI, so just typing

apt-get install xxx-desktop

might get you the desktop, but many apps designed for the new desktop UI only partially work, and some not at all. This is why kubuntu, xubuntu and lubuntu end up with their own install discs, even though (IIRC) they use the same repositories (ie, codebase) as ubuntu.

Whoever they are, they seem to be very interested in KDE. All the projects they sponsor are either KDE apps or KDE based OS.They sponsor NetRunner OS with is based on Kubuntu. So it does make sense when they decided to put their money behind Kubuntu when Canonical made the announcement that they were turning Kubuntu to the community.

I was always a Gnome fan and Ubuntu fan. Have been using Ubuntu since Ubuntu 6.4. When Unity came out, I wanted to give it a fair shot and I did. However things like the total lack of customization and general slowness when opening dash turned me off (gnome-do + docky offer a much faster solution). I also tried gnome-shell for a bit. This is also somewhat limited in the ways you can customize it (e.g. what about 2x2 workspaces?) and general problems with graphic drivers ( I was getting hard freezes 1-3 times a day, which made it impractical)

So couple of months ago I tried KDE 4.7. I Instantly liked how it is very similar to the desktop Im used to, but also offers interesting things like plasma widgets and is very customizable. I would not want to go back to gnome again.

So now I have a choice of distributions to pick. There is the Chakra project, which is totally awesome (I tried it for a while), however, it is not yet ready for prime time (things like installing non-KDE is very cumbersome and requires a lot of time). Kubuntu on the other hand comes with the awesome packaging system from ubuntu which makes installing applications a breeze. Moreover, almost any project out there, has an ubuntu repository (if its not already in the default repositories) making it the default choice if you dont want to start compiling applications for yourself.

When I heard about Canonical dropping Kubuntu, I was worried at first that it might go under. But this development makes a very happy camper and am looking forward at the next releases of Kubuntu!

Typing this on x64 natty. So what you say ? Kubuntu finally allowed me to leave windows for good !Now there is no going back. I experimented for many years with all different distros. There was alwayssomegodforsaken problem with network or sound or dependancies. About 2 years ago i put Kubuntuon my Laptop and for the first time everything just worked. It allowed me to get confident with the linuxenvironment, i got my iphone to sync and then it was my main desktop, and then i was converting friends